On the Cover: John Slattery

GQ goes one-on-one with Mad Men's Roger Sterling to talk about Matthew Weiner's contract dispute, being typecast, and growing into that gray mane

What’s it like to be in the same room as John Slattery? It’s normal, mostly. You know how some actors look more like themselves and others look less like themselves? John Slattery looks less like himself. His face doesn’t appear to be an exquisite carving made from wood, the way it does on television. On this evening—a Monday in the part of winter when New York is like Sweden and makes you want to drink your face off—he’s wearing some gray stubble. Slattery is almost 50. For most of his career, he’s been the kind of gray-haired person who gets cast in Plavix ads to make you hopeful about getting old, because he’s not really old. But he’s growing into his gray. It’s 8 p.m. He’s just flown home from seeing the Super Bowl with his kid, had some dinner with his wife, and arrived at a bar, called the Little Branch, in Lower Manhattan.

"I was going to get Old Rip Van Winkle," he tells the waitress. That’s a kind of bourbon. "But I’m told you’re out of it. Anything resemble that?" Something called Eagle Rare might be up his alley. It arrives, served with a beautiful hunk of ice that might be sold at an airport gift shop as a paperweight. He admires this ice cube. It’s a great ice cube. That’s also what he’s like. A guy who knows about bourbons and good ice cubes. Which is the same, at this moment, as a guy who knows about a good wad cotton jacket. (It turns out we’re both wearing the same brand of wad jacket. It’s like we’ve been reading this magazine.)

The Super Bowl was a shit show, he says. He has on black-framed glasses that set off the angles of his face in an appealing way, a green T-shirt bearing the name of a surfwear company, and those Australian leather slip-on boots that seem made for foreign correspondents. The Super Bowl, he says, felt like a big corporate payback. A gala for the client: "Everything is so produced. Every party is like the Emmys or something. Four hundred thousand square feet of ice sculptures and dog acts and Lenny Kravitz." But that was all okay. The problem was that the Patriots lost.

Slattery is from Newton, Massachusetts, and he follows the Patriots seriously. Sitting down and having a conversation with him is like being with an old friend from high school who was a great athlete (the one who wanted to make sure people knew he was also a thespian with deep thoughts). He’s still an athlete: He skis; he surfs.

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"Yeah, if you have the right gear, it doesn’t bother me," he says when I ask him if he’s ever surfed in the winter. He lives in New York, mostly, and that’s what some surfers do here. "I was reading about surfing in the Arctic Circle. You get these great waves, and there’s nobody around. And if you have a five-mil[limeter] suit and hood and gloves, you’re not cold. You’re only out there for a couple of hours, anyway."

You’re only out there in the Arctic for a couple of hours? Seriously? Apparently, yes.

Slattery has just finished shooting the fifth season of Mad Men, playing Roger Sterling. Matt Weiner, the creator, had a heated showdown last March with AMC, the network that makes Mad Men. AMC said the public would have to wait until March 2012 for the show to return (which it just did) and blamed the delay on Weiner.

"It wasn’t so much a showdown. That whole thing was a lot of bullshit," says Slattery. "AMC was always going to put the show on [this year rather than last year]. The press took one story and ran with it, which is that Matt was holding out for a lot of money. And that wasn’t really the truth. It wasn’t about Matt’s deal."

I’d argue that in the metaphysics of the show, we, the viewers, are Jon Hamm and the Mad Men part of the show is John Slattery. Without him, there’s nothing. The series has defined him, too. It’s as if five years ago he emerged fully formed into public consciousness as someone we knew but couldn’t quite place. That’s important in a show about a shared past (that we need not have necessarily shared). The actor was familiar because he was a type (handsome, boyish, hiding something) but also because he’d had small parts in a lot of popular shows (Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City, Law Order). We’ve been subjected to John Slattery subliminal advertising. He’s proof you can emerge from that world of working but unknown actors—let’s call it the Fraternal Order of Law Order— even in your forties to become a Person We Recognize on the Street. Slattery is contracted to do two more seasons. Is there a downside to being one particular character for so long?

"You see people from Seinfeld and Friends and whatever, Gilligan’s Island, and you go, ’There’s Gilligan!’ " he says. "I’m sure there are meetings going on: ’What about Slattery?’ ’No, can’t use him; he plays that guy on Mad Men.’ On the flip side, I’ve gotten a lot of opportunities I certainly wouldn’t have had."

On Mad Men, Slattery has a magnetic self-possession—perhaps the only actor on that show who truly does. He’s got that in person, too. But on the continuum of public figures, the effect of being in a room with Slattery is different from that of sharing a room with your Brad Pitt&#x2013;style megastar, which is like being seated next to a two-ton $240,000 Aston Martin that you will never ever be allowed to sit in or touch. It’s also unlike being with a 26-year-old star, a Dave Franco, who is still trying to divine who other people think he is and why they like him. The effect, instead, is of a man—a minor Internet mogul, someone who owns a chain of wildly successful wine stores, a guy in a wad cotton jacket and black-plastic-framed glasses—who’s been afforded unusual opportunities to see the world and think about how he wants to live his life and learn about bourbon but hasn’t completely extracted himself from the reality most of us live in. That makes him seem, like I said, a version of normal. Before he leaves, I ask him about the pressures of his career, and he doesn’t appear to feel much at all. "I don’t have to worry about how my movies sell because I’m not the guy in front," he says. "I’ve never been number one. I’ve never been the star of the thing."

He may or may not know he’s actually the star of, honestly, the best and most influential show of the past five years. But he does seem to get that he has a very good life. I mean, I don’t know; I met with him for two hours. But that’s the impression he gave.

Devin Friedman is a writer and the director of editorial projects at GQ.

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